Football's just a branch of science

Written over a year ago, before DougieDougie etc...



In reaction to Celtic's dossier of dodgy refereeing decisions, I've
seen a few people recently say "any team could come up with a list of
decisions that have gone against their team". This led to me thinking
"Well, could they? if they could, would all the lists be equally
compelling?". It's easy to list anecdotal evidence from far-off cup
finals, but is there any way to make it more scientific?

I think there could be, but it would require a TV station to
orchestrate some scientific endeavour. Here is my experiment.

The TV company approach the most popular fans website for each SPL
team. They ask them to nominate incidents from this season's SPL where
they think that their team has been hard-done-by. let's say 20 per
team. how they decide on the 20 is up to them (an internet vote might
be hijacked by other teams, for example).

We now need to have these incidents evaluated by bona fide neutrals.
I'm going to assume that no-one in Scotland is neutral, not even Chick
Young.

So, the TV company go to mainland Europe and get people to rate them
for outrageousness. 0 being "the referee was absolutely right", 10
being "that goal in a Watford game that was well past the post". The
volunteer is shown a clip at random, and asked to rate it. this is
repeated till they get fed up. If a Falkirk incident against Hibs is
given a 10, Falkirk are given 10 points, and Hibs lose 10. each have
their "incidents voted on" increased by one.

after lots and lots of ratings, each team's average number of points
per incidents voted on is put in to a league table. those at the top
are the teams most sinned against, and those at the bottom, those most
favoured.

for people to do the rating, I would think people at five-a-side
centres would do, but if you want to increase the newsworthiness,
maybe people taking UEFA coaching classes would be better. but less
likely to volunteer, perhaps. foreign referees would probably still
back the referee, but having them as a different sample might be
interesting too.

this would of course involve people in said TV company going on a trip
to europe, but i don't think that should be a problem, somehow.

The results would lead to lots of discussion and hits on the relevant
website i'm sure, and would actually add to the sum of human
knowledge.

in short, it would be a bit like hotornot.com for refereeing
decisions. dallasorgallus if you will.

Until some sort of scientific measurement is attempted by the media,
the words "paranoia" and "conspiracy theory" should be stricken from
lexicon.